6 Resume Mistakes That Will Not Earn You The Interview

Lisa Quast has a vast career with more than 20 years of experience as a hiring manager and career coach. In one of her latest posts, she summarizes the 6 mistakes commonly found in resumes that she remembers made her throw them into the garbage!

According to Quast, the 6 issues you should avoid are:

1. Grammar, spelling and punctuation mistakes

if you were a hiring manager that just sat down to read a recently received resume and as you star reading and begin to find all these mistakes, what would you think of this person? would you want to meet them? most probably not. Well, thats exactly what happens in real life with real hiring managers. As soon as they spot all the writing mistakes what they assume is that this person’s work will most likely commit to be full of errors too.

2. Difficult to read formats

Unless you’re a designer, try not to get too creative with your resume layout. Remember you are looking to point out your achievements and experience, not how you can master Word. Don’t give hiring managers a hard time, you want to leave them with an eager to meet you, not to never see you!

3. If you don’t have the required minimum years of experience, don’t apply!

You should really reconsider applying for a job you know you don’t meet the the years of experience for. Try to be realistic. Besides, you should also have in mind, that if you don’t meet the minim year requirement and you were to be considered for the position, you could be walking into an unknown territory that in the end, lacking the experience might turn against you and your performance. So really, for your own good, think twice!

4. Your skills don’t match the job description

Similar to the case of the years of experience requirement, some skills are not transferable from one job position to another. If are applying to a job with responsibilities that you are unfamiliar with, what makes you think the hiring manager would further want to meet you? Specially, if we are talking of managerial positions.

5. Gaps in your work history without explanation

On the contrary of what most people think, work gaps are not that big of a deal, as long as you justify or explain why that happened. For example, if you were taking your MBA or decided to volunteer for a time, and took that time off work, it’s perfectly fine. Just be sure to put that in your resume and don’t assume that the person who’s going to read it will automatically think “Oh, maybe he was doing a master’s”.

6. You don’t have experience managing people but you’re applying for a job position that requires to

It’s okay that you want to continue growing as a professional and consider that the next step in your career should include a job position where you have to manage others. But what you shouldn’t expect, is to walk into a position like this coming from a no-people management scenario. So, in order to progress into that you should look for opportunities where you can become involve in leading others. Such like, volunteering to lead project teams with progressively more people and more complex topics.